Warning: Contains spoiler, so I advise you to complete the game before reading ahead.

Kin is the first game I have ever worked with to put my skills as a spriter to the test. I have worked on several games before, but to be the main pixel artist was invigorating and a huge learning process. This was also my first time working with RMVXA as a platformer.

The Contest:
RMN held a one-month contest during October 2013 called All Hallows’ Event. The idea was to make the spookiest Halloween game ever with one or more of the following themes: ghost stories, survival horror, monster attack, Halloween comedy, or nonfiction horror. Groups would be able to complete the game in any engine.

What Went Well:
Story: Although we did not get the story done in one day, our team played hot-potato with the idea and got something fleshed out fairly quickly. The story was simple and to the point: Frann goes through her twisted house to save her brother, Robin. We wanted to expand the story out more, but with only a month to work on it, we stuck with an easy story to follow through.
Art: Our team is a group of three artists and two programmers who fixed some of the events and heavily beta-tested our game … so art was really easy to work with! We split our job accordingly and even collaborated on a few pieces together. This was the category we were best at and we did not want to half-ass ourselves on this. Sai (radiostarkiller) did superbly well with the sketches of the profiles and monsters, the gruesome credit images, and the chilling background images. So, like, if it wasn’t for his works, our art wouldn’t have any direction to gear towards so many thanks! Hirei, although she was our main programmer, helped with coloring the profiles and gave suggestions to the art. I kept the color palette and animation simple, keeping the characters and monsters separated from the scenes they were in. As my main skill in drawing was lining, I did all the lineart for the profiles and just seeing the pieces put together was amazing. Our game may be eye-candy, but we worked with what we were stron9est with!
Music: Personally, I would love to thank the musician who is a good friend of mine and right when I posted a teaser of our game on Facebook, she quickly sent me a message to ask if she can help. And with a simple yes and a quick summary of our story, Laryssa (laryssachan) was able to whip up eight soundtracks for our game in less than a week! Our team loved it quickly and having it in-game pretty much gave our game the feel we wanted it to have.
Gameplay: We’re going for a platformer, so we went with a platformer with basic platforming mechanics. What else can go wrong …?

What Went Wrong:
Story: Although our story was not going to be longer than it is, there was a lot more of the story we wanted to add in. The choice was not up to player if they got the good or bad ending of the game. Originally, collecting journal entries would be harder and if not all was collected, the player would receive the bad ending since Frann does not know her Grandmother’s true intention. Second, the family that was going to be dead was actually Frann and Robin’s parents (and older sibling? We scrapped this idea midway) to have it appear more gruesome. All in all, the story idea was firm and stuck throughout the whole creation phase.
Art: We had very few problems with the art and the only thing that was troublesome was that some of the monsters were too big for the hall ways and a few of the sprite sheets needed to be redone. Other than that, like I said, art was what our team was best at, so there was very little problems in this area.
Music: Not a problem, but the music files are HUGE. Sadly, that’s what you get from .wav files, but nonetheless, no problems here at all!
Gameplay: Our programmer, Hirei, had the most trouble with working with this. Making a platformer was easy, but creating the triggers and events for the cutscenes were much harder than expected. Many bugs got in our way and our beta testers ran through a lot of trouble the past few days. While many were fixed, there are still many bugs within the game that we were unable to fix due to our time restraint. But hey, we did it! I’m actually a bit too excited to expand on this since I did not work with the programs and events AT ALL.